Cities in Flight

by James Blish

  It was impossible. On the cleats, Paige felt as though he were trying to climb into a .22 calibre long-rifle cartridge. To get ten people into this tiny shell, you’d have to turn them into some sort of human concentrate and pour them, like powdered coffee.

  Nevertheless, one of the marines met him in the airlock and within another minute he was strapping himself down inside a windowless cabin as big as any he’d ever seen on board a standard interplanetary vessel—far bigger than any ferry could accommodate. The intercom box at the head of his hammock was already calling the clearance routine.

  “Dog down and make all fast. Airlock will cycle in one minute.”

  What had happened to Anne? She had come up the cleats after him, of that he was sure—

  “All fast. Take-off in one minute. Passengers ’ware G’s.”

  —but he’d been hustled down to this nonsensical cabin too fast to look back. There was something very wrong. Was Wagoner—

  ‘Thirty seconds. ’Ware G’s.”

  —making some sort of a getaway? But from what? And why did he want to take Paige and Anne with him? As hostages they were—

  “Twenty seconds.”

  —worthless, since they were of no value to the government, had no money, knew nothing damning about Wagoner—

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  But wait a minute. Anne knew something about Wagoner, or thought she did.

  “Ten seconds. Stand by.”

  The call made him relax instinctively. There would be time to think about that later. At take-off—

  “Five seconds.”

  —it didn’t pay—

  “Four.”

  —to concentrate—

  “Three.”

  —on anything—

  ‘Two.”

  —else but

  “One.”

  —actual—

  “Zero.”

  —take-off hit him with the abrupt, bone-cracking, gut-wrenching impact of all ferry take-offs. There was nothing you could do to ameliorate it but let the strong muscles of the arms and legs and back bear it as best they could, with the automatic tetanus of the Seyle GA reaction, and concentrate on keeping your head and your abdomen in exact neutral with the acceleration thrust. The muscles you used for that were seldom called upon on the ground, even by weight-lifters, but you learned to use them or were invalided out of the service; a trained spaceman’s abdominal muscles will bounce a heavy rock, and no strong man can make him turn his head if his neck muscles say no.

  Also, it helped a little to yell. Theoretically, the yell collapses the lungs—acceleration pneumothorax, the books call it—and keeps them collapsed until the surge of powered flight is over. By that time, the carbon dioxide level of the blood has risen so high that the breathing reflex will reassert itself with an enormous gasp, even if crucial chest muscles have been torn. The yell makes sure that when next you breathe, you breathe.

  But more importantly for Paige and every other spaceman, the yell was the only protest he could form against that murderous nine seconds of pressure; it makes you feel better. Paige yelled with vigor.

  He was still yelling when the ship went into free fall.

  Instantly, while the yell was still dying incredulously in his throat, he was clawing at his harness. All his spaceman’s reflexes had gone off at once. The powered-flight period had been too short. Even the shortest possible take-off acceleration outlasts the yell. Yet the ion-rockets were obviously silenced. The little ship’s power had failed—she was falling back to the Earth—

  “Attention, please,” the intercom box said mildly. “We are now under way. Free fall will last only a few seconds. Stand by for restoration of normal gravity.”

  And then …. And then the hammock against which Paige was struggling was down again, as though the ship were still resting quietly on Earth. Impossible; she couldn’t even be out of the atmosphere yet. Even if she were, free fall should last all the rest of the trip. Gravity in an interplanetary vessel—let alone a ferry—could be re-established only by rotating the ship around its long axis; few captains bothered with the fuel-expensive maneuvre, since hardly anybody but old hands flew between the planets. Besides, this ship—the Per Aspera— hadn’t gone through any such maneuvre, or Paige would have detected it.

  Yet his body continued to press down against the hammock with an acceleration of one Earth gravity.

  “Attention, please. We will be passing the Moon in one point two minutes. The observation blister is now open to passengers. Senator Wagoner requests the presence of Miss Abbott and Colonel Russell in the blister.”

  There was no further sound from the ion-rockets, which had inexplicably been shut off when the Per Aspera could have been no more than 250 miles above the surface of the Earth. Yet she was passing the Moon now, without the slightest sensation of movement, though she must still be accelerating. What was driving her? Paige could hear nothing but the small hum of the ship’s electrical generator, no louder than it would have been on the ground, unburdened of the job of RF-heating the electron-ion plasma which the rockets used. Grimly, he unsnapped the last gripper from his harness, conscious of what a baby he evidently was on board this ship, and got up.

  The deck felt solid and abnormal under his feet, pressing against the soles of his shoes with a smug terrestrial pressure of one unvarying gravity. Only the habits of caution of a service lifetime prevented him from running forward up the companionway to the observation blister.

  Anne and Senator Wagoner were there, the dimming moonlight bathing their backs as they looked ahead into deep space. They had been more than a little shaken up by the take-off, that was obvious, but they were already almost recovered; compared to the effects of the normal ferry take-off, this could only have ruffled them; and of course the sudden transformation to the impossible one-gravity field would not have bollized their untrained reflexes with anything like the thoroughness that it had scrambled Paige’s long-conditioned reactions. Looked at this way, space-flight like this might well be easier for civilians than it would be for spacemen, at least for some years to come.

  He padded cautiously toward them, feeling disastrously humbled. Shining between them was a brilliant, hard spot of yellow-white light, glaring into the blister through the thick, cosmics-proof glass. The spot was fixed and steady, as were all the stars looking into the blister; proof positive that the ship’s gravity was not being produced by axial spin. The yellow spot itself, shining between Wagoner’s elbow and Anne’s upper arm, was—

  Jupiter.

  On either side of the planet were two smaller bright dots; the four Galilean satellites, as widely separated to Paige’s naked eye as they would have looked on Earth through a telescope the size of Galileo’s.

  While Paige hesitated in the doorway to the blister, the little spots that were Jupiter’s largest moons visibly drew apart from each other a little, until one of them went into occultation behind Anne’s right shoulder. The Per Aspera was still accelerating; it was driving toward Jupiter at a speed nothing in Paige’s experience could have prepared him for. Stunned, he made a very rough estimate in his head of the increase in parallax and tried to calculate the ship’s rate of approach from that.

  The little lunar ferry, humming scarcely louder than a transformer for carrying five people—let alone ten—as far as SV-1, was now hurtling toward Jupiter at about a quarter of the speed of light.

  At least forty thousand miles per second.

  And the deepening color of Jupiter showed that the Per Aspera was still picking up speed.

  “Come in, Colonel Russell,” Wagoner’s voice said, echoing slightly in the blister. “Come watch the show. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  CHAPTER TEN: Jupiter V

  That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put ‘common sense’ where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister label
ed ‘discarded nonsense.’

  —ERIC TEMPLE BELL

  THE SHIP that landed as Helmuth was going on duty did nothing to lighten the load on his heart. In shape it was not distinguishable from any of the short-range ferries which covered the Jovian satellary circuit, carrying supplies from the regular SV-1-Mars-Belt-Jupiter X cruiser to the inner moons—and, sometimes, some years-old mail; but it was considerably bigger than the usual Jovian ferry, and it grounded its outsize mass on Jupiter V with only the briefest cough of rockets.

  That landing told Helmuth that his dream was well on its way to coming true. If the high brass had a real anti-gravity, there would have been no reason why the ion-streams should have been necessary at all. Obviously, what had been discovered was some sort of partial gravity screen, which allowed a ship to operate with far less rocket thrust than was usual, but which still left it subject to a sizable fraction of the universal G, the inherent stress of space.

  Nothing less than a complete, and completely controllable gravity screen would do, on Jupiter.

  And theory said that a complete gravity screen was impossible. Once you set one up—even supposing that you could—you would be unable to enter it or leave it. Crossing a boundary-line between a one G field and a no-G field would be precisely as difficult as surmounting a high-jump with the bar set at infinity, and for the same reasons. If you crossed it from the other direction, you would hit the ground on the other side of the line as hard as though you had fallen there from the Moon; a little harder, in fact.

  Helmuth worked mechanically at the gang board, thinking. Charity was not in evidence, but there was no special reason why the foreman’s board had to be manned on this trick. The work could be as easily supervised from here, and obviously Charity had expected Helmuth to do it that way, or he would have left notice. Probably Charity was already conferring with the senators, receiving what would be for him the glad news.

  Helmuth realized suddenly that there was nothing left for him to do now, once this trick was over, but to cut and run.

  There could be no real reason why he should be required to re-enact the entire nightmare, helplessly, event for event like an actor committed to a role. He was awake now, in full control of his own senses, and still at least partially sane. The man in the dream had volunteered—but that man would not be Robert Helmuth. Not any longer.

  While the senators were here on Jupiter V, he would turn in his resignation. Direct—over Charity’s head.

  The wave of relief came washing over him just as he finished resetting the circuits which would enable him to supervise from the gang board, and left him so startlingly weak that he had to put the helmet down on the ledge before he had raised it half-way to his head. So that had been what he had been waiting for: to quit, nothing more.

  He owed it to Charity to finish the Grand Tour of the Bridge. After that, he’d be free. He would never have to see the Bridge again, not even inside a viewing helmet. A farewell tour, and then back to Chicago, if there was still such a place.

  He waited until his breathing had quieted a little, scooped the helmet up on to his shoulders, and the Bridge …

  … came falling into existence all around him, a Pandemonium beyond broaching and beyond hope, sealed on all sides. The drumfire of rain against his beetle’s hull was so loud that it hurt his ears, even with the gain knob of his helmet backed all the way down to the thumb-stop. It was impossible to cut the audio circuit out altogether; much of his assessment of how the Bridge was responding to stress depended on sound; human eyesight on the Bridge was almost as useless as a snail’s.

  And the bridge was responding now, as always, with its medley of dissonance and cacophony: crang … crang … spungg … skreek … crang … ungg … oingg … skreek … skreek …. These structural noises were the only ones that counted; they were the polyphony of the Bridge, everything else was decorative and to be ignored by the Bridge operator—the fioritura shrieking of the winds, the battery of the rain, the pedal diapason of thunder, the distant grumbling roll of the stage-hand volcanoes pushing continents back and forth on castors down below.

  This time, however, at long last, it was impossible to ignore any part of this great orchestra. Its composite uproar was enormous, implacable, incredible even for Jupiter, overwhelming even in this season. The moment he heard it, Helmuth knew that he had waited too long.

  The Bridge was not going to last much longer. Not unless every man and woman on Jupiter V fought without sleep to keep it up, throughout this passage of the Red Spot and the South Tropical Disturbance—

  —if even that would serve. The great groans that were rising through the tornado-riven mists from the caissons were becoming steadily, spasmodically deeper; their hinges were already overloaded. And the deck of the Bridge was beginning to rise and fall a little, as though slow, frozen waves were passing along it from one unfinished end to the other. The queasy, lazy tidal swell made the beetle tip first its nose into the winds, then its tail, then back again, so that it took almost all of the current Helmuth could feed into the magnet windings to keep the craft stuck to the rails on the deck at all. Cruising the deck seemed to be out of the question; there was not enough power left over for the engines—almost every available erg had to be devoted to staying put.

  But there was still the rest of the Grand Tour to be made. And still one direction which Helmuth had yet to explore:

  Straight down.

  Down to the ice; down to the Ninth Circle, where everything stops, and never starts again.

  There was a set of tracks leading down one of the Bridge’s great buttresses, on to which Helmuth could switch the beetle in nearby sector 94. It took him only a few moments to set the small craft to creeping, head downward, toward the surface.

  The meters on the ghost board had already told him that the wind velocity fell off abruptly at twenty-one miles—that is, eleven miles down from the deck—in this sector, which was in the lee of The Glacier, a long rib of mountain-range which terminated nearby. He was unprepared, however, for the near-calm itself. There was some wind, of course, as there was everywhere on Jupiter, especially at this season; but the worst gusts were little more than a few hundred miles per hour, and occasionally the meter fell as low as seventy-five.

  The lull was dream-like. The beetle crawled downward through it, like a skin-diver who has already passed the safety-knot on his line, but is too drugged by the ecstasy of the depths to care. At fifteen miles, something white flashed in the fan-lights, and was gone. Then another; three more. And then, suddenly, a whole stream of them.

  Belatedly, Helmuth stopped the beetle and peered ahead, but the white things were gone now. No, there were more of them, drifting quite slowly through the lights. As the wind died momentarily, they almost seemed to hover, pulsating slowly—

  Helmuth heard himself grunt with astonishment. Once, in a moment of fancy, he had thought of Jovian jellyfish. That was what these looked like—jellyfish, not of the sea, but of the air. They were ten-ribbed, translucent, ranging in size from that of a closed fist to one as big as a football. They were beautiful—and looked incredibly delicate for this furious planet.

  Helmuth reached forward to turn up the lights, but the wind rose just as his hand closed on the knob, and the creatures were gone. In the increased glare, Helmuth saw instead that there was a large platform jutting out from the buttress not far below him, just to one side of the rails. It was enclosed and roofed, but the material was transparent. And there was motion inside it.

  He had no idea what the structure could be; evidently it was recent. Although he had never been below the deck in this sector before, he knew the plans well enough to recall that they had specified no such excrescence.

  For a wild instant he had thought that there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform’s roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was—of course—a robot: a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles an
d flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it. The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope.

  The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles. At first Helmuth failed to understand; then he saw that the machine was pointing to the fanlights, and obediently turned them almost all the way down. In the resulting Jovian gloom he could see that the laboratory—for that was obviously what it was—had plenty of artificial light of its own.

  There was, of course, no way that he could talk to the robot, nor it to him. If he wanted to, he could talk to the person operating it; but he knew the assignment of every man and woman on Jupiter V, and running this thing was no part of any of their duties. There was not even any provision for it on the boards—

  A white light began to wink on the ghost board. That would be the incoming line for Europa. Was somebody on that snowball in charge of this many-tentacled experimenter, using Jupiter V’s booster station to amplify the signals that guided it? Curiously, he plugged the jack in.

  “Hello, the Bridge! Who’s on duty there?”

  “Hello, Europa. This is Bob Helmuth. Is this your robot I’m looking at, in sector ninety-four?”

  “That’s me,” the voice said. It was impossible to avoid thinking of it as coming from the robot itself. “This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?”

  “Very cosy,” Helmuth said. “I didn’t even know it existed. What do you do in it?”

  “We just got it installed this year. It’s to study the Jovian life-forms. You’ve seen them?”

  “You mean the jellyfish? Are they really alive?”

  “Yes,” the robot said. “We are keeping it under our hats until we have more data, but we knew that sooner or later one of you beetle-goosers would see them. They’re alive, all right. They’ve got a colloidal continuum-discontinuum exactly like protoplasm—except that it uses liquid ammonia as a sol substrate, instead of water.”